My Film "Witt's Daughter" will be screening At the Laemmle Grand
 

my film “Witt’s Daughter” has a limited release of three days: September 28, 29, 30, 2008 at the Laemmle Grand 4 plex in downtown LA. Showtimes at 5:00pm and 7:30 pm.* This is very exciting!

If you're interested in seeing it, please come by!

Here's a couple of links for you witt_index the film website (complete with trailer)
and
http://www.laemmle.com/viewtheatre.p...282008&thid=10 the Laemmle movie theatre web site.

Oh-- and it will be playing at the Hollywood film festival as well, October 25, 2008 at 11:00PM
http://hollywoodawards.com/index.html

maybe I'll see you there!
Carole

Looks very good! Please give us some details about the camera and equipment used, etc.

Congratulations!
 

Looks great and I wish the best of luck. Where did you shoot?

Equipment/Location
 

Howdy, thanks for asking. Sorry, I didn't think to include that information before.
Witt's Daughter was shot on a Panasonic HVX-200. When I hired my Cinematographer, Jeffrey Siljenberg, he was eager to use the Sony F900 (is that the name) but it was too expensive for me, plus, I had read that Panasonic did not need an inbetween program to feed into final cut pro (which did not prove to be entirely true. I ended up having to get P2 log pro because of intermittent P2 unfixable corruption.)

But he is a brilliant Lighter, and I showed him some mid century illustrator's as far as what I wanted the image to look like, and he was amazing and gave it to me. ( Finding Inspiration for the Look of Witt’s Daughter Witt’s Bits) is a link to my blog that talks about what inspired the look. Plus he helped me find my crew, as with the exception of a film in UCLA extension, this was my first attempt at making a film.

We rented our grip from Cinelease in Burbank-- wonderful people, I couldn't recommend them more. The camera came from EVS. And they are awesome! We got our dolly and jib arm at Wooden Nickel. We had one day on a process trailer (we had toyed for a moment with trying green screen, but I shied away from that because the shot was a convertible and I had seen a movie that was a green screen convertible shot that was wonderfully lit, but looked entirely unnatural. And because it was the first scene of the film, I didn't want to take the chance of losing the audience out of the gate.

Our locations were a house in Glendale and an one mile stretch of road in Palmdale (due to insurance issues-- ie, it would go up tremendously just by crossing the stoplight and ending up in Lancaster-- both insurance and permit. So we went back and forth for a mile, like a Fred Flintstone pan. Switching sides when the sun changed angles.) The Teamster who drove the truck was amazed we were trying to shoot 4 pages in a day-- it was just my inexperience that scheduled it that way. We got it done, but it was a long, rough and hot day-- but according to the lead by far the most fun.

For a pro indie crew, 8 to 12 pages is do-able. When we shot Shakespeare's Merchant, we had 3 days to shoot the 45 page court room scene from Merchant Of Venice. The experienced 1st AD said we'd get out early on the third day and with plenty of coverage. Everyone else blanched, but he was right. We did. We had an 8 to 1 shooting ratio, and all the coverage our editor needed. But it takes time to learn how to do that. It's all about scheduling, and having a very well-rehearsed cast that shows up on set, has their lines down cold, and knows exactly what the director expects of them. And too few directors take that seriously.

Anyway, sounds like a wonderful experience. I wish you the best of luck and many great projects to come.

Wow, thats a lot of pages. My entire script was 35 pages and I decided I wanted to do three a day, since I wanted this to be my director's reel and I wanted to take my time with it. But it was a little tight even still since most of the film had a four year old child in it and I was working in accordance with the California rules of working with children. (six and a half hour day with only three of it working.) I believe she was on the set eleven of the fourteen days we shot (including pick ups) We shot around her as much as we could. With the car scene, we had to do a lot of resetting, so that ate up time. We'd get half way through take , have to stop, then turn around and go back to the beginning and pick up we left off. We didn't have an AD at first. (although the production designer filled in for that on the second, third day-- or else we would have never finished.) I eventually hired a friend to AD and then we had a third fellow who AD on the pick ups...yeah, thinks ran a lot smoother after that.

I hope I did not sound like I was all that for saying I did four pages in one day, I know that it goes way higher. In fact, I chuckled because my Cinematographer jokingly called my schedule "luxurious" for having it be three pages a day. I only commented on the driver being amazed that we were trying to get four pages done in a day because I believe the process trailer teamster was used to working on projects that had a lower page count. I wish I could remember exactly what he said, but it was something to that effect. But a big problem with the car shoot was that we had an HMI that kept going out, and that combined with the July desert heat, combined with the fact that I rewrote the pages three days before we shot it wrecked havoc on one of the actors. Every time the light would wink out it would throw off his patter. Then we would go as far as we could and then reset. Eventually, we took down the HMI and put up a giant Shiney and everything was great after that.

Process trailer work is indeed always slow going, from rigging and safetying camera positions for each setup to the lengthy resets between takes etc. A lot depends on how many cameras you have (I've done up to 3 at once) and how many setups you need for the given scene of course. As an operator I can't say as I'm a big fan of process days--pretty boring stuff usually, and often uncomfortable! More enjoyable is when we are working off an arm with remote head and I can sit up on the Shotmaker, and even better is when we are doing hood mounts and hostess trays and I get to hang out at base camp and kibitz!

Under most circumstances, I'd consider 8 pages to be the comfortable limit for a show that has production value--i.e. not being shot down-and-dirty. Within a largely pre-lit environment and with the sort of planning that Lori describes, it's possible to knock out more. Studio features average around 3 pages a day, with episodic television between 6-8.

Sorry Carole, just realized where this thread started--congrats on the screening and I assume you are in Academy consideration (I have a film that screened at Laemelle recently also)--best of luck with that!

Best of luck for you too! Your stuff looks nice, I saw your reel, so I assume your movie must be lovely as well.

What an interesting and inspiring read! I’ll be spending a lot of time enjoying your blog, as well.

Thanks so much for the insights, Carole. Congratulations, and best wishes to you on this gorgeous film. I wish so much that I could see it.

Thank you! I read on one of the sites that film festivals look for blogs, so I took one up. I wish I had started doing one sooner, when the memories were more fresh-- but just talking about this process trailer day makes me want to assemble that in a blog!

:-)